Engineering major Batliboi acquired a 70 % stake in AESA Air Engineering, SA, Europe's premier air engineering technology company for 1.6 million euros, reports Ranju Sarkar.

Engineering major Batliboi on Wednesday acquired a 70 per cent stake in AESA Air Engineering, SA, Europe's premier air engineering technology company for 1.6 million euros (around Rs 9 crore) in an all-cash deal.

This is the second acquisition for the Rs 300-crore company, which is a leading player in textile air engineering and machine tools. In March 2007, Batliboi had acquired QuickMill, a Canadian machine tool company for Rs 19 crore.

Though small in value, these acquisitions will help Batliboi take on aggressive rivals at home and fuel its global aspirations. QuickMill, for instance, is a leader in making machinery for heat exchangers, cooling towers, across North America.

AESA, which is a leading player in air engineering across Europe and Asia, will help Batliboi take on rivals like Luwa of Switzerland and LLG of Germany at home and leverage AESA's wider expertise to reach out to other industries like paper, tobacco, glass and glass fibres.

For now, Batliboi's air engineering business largely caters to the cotton textile industry-it supplies solutions for climate control, humidity control. Controlling humidity is essential part of textile manufacturing or else the yarn breaks.

''AESA offers air engineering solutions for synthetics and non-wovens. We will be able to reach out to more customers as well as target other industries,'' said Krushanlal Swami, executive director & CFO, Batliboi, which claims a 50 per cent market share in the country's Rs 175-crore air engineering market.

The acquisition will also help Batliboi emerge as a global player in textile air engineering by using AESA presence in European, South American and Asian markets and through its subsidiaries in Italy, Singapore, China and India.

AESA will gain by sourcing from India and improving its costs to increase its market share globally. Batliboi hopes the acquisition will help it double the size of its textile air engineering business from around Rs 90 crore a year.